Illness Memoir 'The Iceberg' Wins Wellcome Book Prize

Marion Coutts and cover of “The Iceberg”

British artist and writer Marion Coutts won the medically themed Wellcome Trust Book Prize on Wednesday with "The Iceberg," a memoir of her husband's life with, and death from, a brain tumor.

Funded by charity the Wellcome Trust, the £30,000 pound (US$46,000) prize aims to bridge the gap between literature and science and is open to fiction or nonfiction works published in Britain with a medical or medical-science theme.

Coutts' husband, art critic Tom Lubbock, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2008 and gradually lost the ability to speak, read or write. Coutts' book charts the family's attempt to remain intact in the face of the advancing disease, which killed Lubbock in 2011.

Travel writer Bill Bryson, who chaired the judging panel, called the book "wise, moving and beautifully constructed."

Lubbock's own account of his illness, "Until Further Notice, I am Alive," was published in 2012.

Other finalists for this year's prize were neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's memoir "Do No Harm"; Alice Roberts' exploration of evolution "The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being"; Scott Stossel's mental-health history "My Age of Anxiety"; and the novels "All My Puny Sorrows" by Miriam Toews and "Bodies of Light" by Sarah Moss.